The Principles of Customer Value-Led Growth

Hi, Markus here. Welcome to a premium edition of the Customer-Value-Led-Growth Newsletter.

Every week, I share strategies, guides, and frameworks to help you create exceptional value for your customers and company.

If you are not a paid subscriber, here’s what you might have missed:

• 5 highly effective Tools every CS Team needs to use

• The not-so-Secret to high Product Adoption

• How to build a Customer Success Metric System that rocks

• Customer Onboarding that drives Growth

• How to build a dedicated Customer Success Plan

It’s almost 4 years since I pivoted into the CSM space. What surprised me and still does to this very day is the lack of frameworks and models available.

If you are taking a look left and right you will find plenty of them for marketing, sales and product management. In CSM, applying random tactics people call “best practices” is the name of the game in many companies.

Random tactics that are blindly copied no matter how poor they actually perform. And questioning these holy cows is a no-go.

Fortunatly, I know that you, my dear reader, are one of the few open to innovation because you are striving for excellence in your field.

Today I want to introduce you to the 18 principles powering the Customer Value-Led Growth framework.

A unique approach to transition from reactive to proactive CSM to create more value for customers and revenue for your company.

1. Customer Discovery

Principle 1: Measurable Goals

Customers don’t buy your product for its features and functions. They don’t buy it because they want to spend their time clicking around. They buy your product because they want to accomplish specific goals.

At the beginning of every new customer project, you must establish a clear understand about what’s to be delivered. You need to understand what your customers' goals are and how they are measured.

Otherwise, you don’t have a direction and there’s no accountability. Leaving both sides hanging in the air and likely turning the customer success journey into a bumpy ride with no happy end.

What if your customers don’t know what they want to accomplish? It’s up to you to help them find out. This is where you can immediately show your skills and complete the first step on the road to a trusted advisor.

Come up with qualified suggestions based on

• what their peers are doing

• your experience with similar use cases

• what makes sense based on your expertise

until your customers agree upon one of them.

Principle 2: Thorough Problem Comprehension

Imagine you are seeing a doctor because you have injured your leg during a workout. The doctor creates a diagnosis and comes up with a treatment plan without running a CT first. Does that make sense?

That’s what happens in CSM all the time. The “diagnosis” comes from a superficial sales hand-off that does not contain a thorough analysis of the customer problem.

Sure, you could avoid guessing wrong by applying a one-size-fits-all solution. But your customers are not patient. They will not sift through irrelevant services and content until they find what they actually need (if it even exists).

And that’s assuming that they know what they need. This is not how success stories are built. You need to build a thorough understanding of your customers’ problems and their roots to provide them with an actual solution.

Principle 3: Customer Competence Assessment

2 of your customers are pursuing the same goals. Check. They need to solve the same problems in the right order. Check. Does that mean you can apply the same solution for them?

Not necessarily. Your “therapy” must also consider your customers’ current level of skills and knowledge. It makes a lot of a difference whether your customers are seasoned sales reps or a startup founder selling for the first time.

Before you can create a proper solution you need to evaluate where your customers are starting from. It does not make sense to invite a beginner to a live training session. They need to start with the fundamentals.

At the same time, it does not make sense to share basic guides with the seasoned professionals.

This does not have to be a science project. You could simply split your customers into 3 categories (beginner, intermediate, professional) from a segmentation perspective.

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